GET A LIFE.

• Author: Brown, Kathryn

Carolina Financial Group drew investment bankers from around the globe to Brevard to do just that.

It's a universe away from the marble-floored investment banks of New York. Here, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, there are no soaring towers, plate-glass windows or commissioned works of art. Instead of taxis, school buses roar past the windows of Carolina Financial Group Inc., an investment-bank boutique that for the last three years has been housed in a squat, 2,000-square-foot, white-brick building next to a furniture store and across a narrow, two-lane street from a dry cleaner. It's a stroll away from Brevard's Main Street, lined with antique stores and quaint cafes. In January, space heaters buzzed in the office's four corners, warding off the winter chill for the staff. The dress code: turtlenecks and khakis, fleece pullovers and hiking boots.

Carolina Financial specializes in raising early-stage venture capital for fledgling Internet-technology, health-care and telecommunications companies. It's the brainchild of Bruce Roberts, 42, a former Wall Street banker, now CFG's president and CEO. What's his little investment bank -- one with big ambition -- doing in Brevard, population 6,079? It makes no business sense, he admits. New York or San Francisco, even Charlotte or Atlanta, with their big banks and bustling airports, would have been more practical. But Roberts was bent on enjoying a better lifestyle than the one he left behind five years ago in Connecticut. Most of Brevard's newcomers are retirees, drawn by the bracing mountain air, the waterfalls, the slow pace. Those things appealed to Roberts, too, so he set up his company in the county seat of Transylvania, where the largest employer is a cigarette-paper manufacturer. Still, he's hardly unusual. With the advent of technology, businesses can be run from just about anywhere, provided you've g ot a fax machine and an e-mail account. That has sent entrepreneurs flocking to sleepy burgs to build their businesses, trading big-city burdens for the peace of small-town life.

But Roberts, like others, has found that his dream has drawbacks. Technology has shrunk the globe, but Brevard remains a small town served by a small airport. Asheville Regional, a 25-minute drive from CFG's offices, offers direct flights only to Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh and Cincinnati. There are no quick routes to San Francisco, Seattle or Japan -- places the CFG partners regularly visit. Getting to New York takes more than four hours with a stopover in Charlotte. In a business that Roberts says is all about relationships, it's not easy to cultivate them from western North Carolina.

That hasn't deterred Roberts, loquacious and energetic, from persuading a pack of Wall Street bankers and others to chuck their jobs and join him. "When you go to New York or Boston, there's generally not one guy who hasn't stared out the window and wished he could do what he's doing in a different setting," says Otto Lowe, a CFG partner. Since 1996, the 20-employee boutique has raised more than $200 million, typically between $2 million and $15 million per financing round, for 17 companies around the country. CFG gets a 5% to 7% cut of the money it raises, plus warrants to purchase clients' stock. So far, the setting hasn't hindered the business.

The most likely casualty isn't the staff's professional lives but their personal ones -- the very thing they came to Brevard to protect. Roberts and his recruits have high hopes for CFG's growth, and like most of their investment-banker brethren, they log long hours, working into the evenings and weekends and spending half their time on the...